It has long been assumed that people have an inherent need for positive self-regard, and self-esteem is one of the most studied concepts in psychological science. Having high self-esteem is associated with a number of positive psychological and physical health outcomes as discussed in some of my previous posts (see Is Religion is Good for your Health?, Nostalgia is Good Medicine). However, is self-esteem important when one is striving to see life as meaningful?
Studies have found that self-esteem is positively correlated with feelings of purpose and meaning. This correlation is not surprising considering that both self-esteem and meaning are considered general indicators of psychological well-being. However, in my opinion, testing for a correlation between two indicators of well-being is not a very insightful examination of the role self-esteem may play in making life meaningful. I think the more valuable test is to determine if self-esteem helps people maintain feelings of meaning when such feelings are under threat.
Though many researchers have talked about the potential for self-esteem to preserve a sense of meaning in the face of existential threat and studies conducted by others and myself are generally consistent with this assertion, no direct experimental test of this hypothesis had been conducted. Therefore, my colleagues and I decided to conduct a number of experiments to address this question.
Specifically, in our studies we measured or experimentally manipulated self-esteem, experimentally manipulated existential threat (i.e. death), and subsequently measured perceptions of meaning. For example, in one study, all participants completed a self-esteem questionnaire and then half of them were asked to write about their own mortality (a threat to meaning) and the other half were asked to write about a psychologically aversive but not existentially threatening topic (e.g., giving a public speech, experiencing physical pain). Then, all participants completed a questionnaire assessing feelings of meaning in life.
Having higher or lower self-esteem impacted life meaninglessness. For people who had low self-esteem, writing about the prospect of death led to feelings of meaninglessness. For people who had high self-esteem, writing about death had no effect on perceptions of meaning. In other words, writing about death had a negative impact on a sense of personal meaning, but only amongst individuals with low self-esteem. People with high self-esteem were not impacted.
In another study, we found an identical pattern of results when we experimentally manipulated (instead of measuring) self-esteem. In this study, to manipulate self-esteem we asked half of the participants to think about their biggest failure in life and how thinking about this failure makes them feel. We asked the other half of the participants to think about their biggest success in life and how thinking about this success makes them feel. Not surprisingly, thinking about failure temporarily decreases self-esteem whereas thinking about success temporarily bolsters it. Then, as in the previous study, participants wrote about death or a control topic and completed a measure of meaning. Thinking about death decreased meaning, but only amongst the participants who had previously contemplated their biggest life failure (low self-esteem people). Participants who had their self-esteem bolstered by writing about a great success were immune from the effects of thinking about death on meaning.
These results provided more compelling (i.e., experimental) evidence for the meaning-providing role of self-esteem and also suggested that there may be some therapeutic value to esteem-oriented interventions as simply having participants spend a few minutes thinking about a life success protected them from the negative psychological effects of thinking about death.
Finally, we also replicated these effects in China. This was important because some scholars have argued that self-esteem is a Western construct and is thus not a universal need. These scholars have asserted that in countries like China, Japan, and Korea, self-esteem is not that important. First, it is important to say that there is now a very large body of evidence that indicates that self-esteem is universal. However, we still found it important to determine whether or not self-esteem helps protect feelings of meaning similarly in different cultures. In our Chinese sample, the effects were identical. Thinking about death threatened meaning, but only amongst Chinese participants with low self-esteem.
In all, self-esteem not only correlates with other well-being indicators such a meaning in life, it helps preserve a sense of meaning in life when people are contemplating topics that challenge life's greater meaning. In his book A Confession, Tolstoy asked "Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?" This is a heavy question, but from a psychological point of view, it appears that feelings of personal worth and value (self-esteem) help make life seem meaningful even though we know it is a fragile and transient experience.
Further reading:
Routledge, C., Ostafin, B., Juhl, J., Sedikides, C., Cathey, C., & Liao, J. (in press). Adjusting to death: The effects of self-esteem and mortality salience on well-being, growth motivation, and maladaptive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
